Longstanding behavioural stability in West Africa extends to the Middle Pleistocene at Bargny, coastal Senegal.

Middle Stone Age (MSA) technologies first appear in the archaeological records of northern, eastern and southern Africa during the Middle Pleistocene epoch. The absence of MSA sites from West Africa limits evaluation of shared behaviours across the continent during the late Middle Pleistocene and the diversity of subsequent regionalized trajectories. Here we present evidence for the late Middle Pleistocene MSA occupation of the West African littoral at Bargny, Senegal, dating to 150 thousand years ago.

Human interactions with tropical environments over the last 14,000 years at Iho Eleru, Nigeria.

The Ihò Eléérú (or Iho Eleru) rock shelter, located in Southwest Nigeria, is the only site from which Pleistocene-age hominin fossils have been recovered in western Africa. Excavations at Iho Eleru revealed regular human occupations ranging from the Later Stone Age (LSA) to the present day. Here, we present chronometric, archaeobotanical, and paleoenvironmental findings, which include the taxonomic, taphonomic, and isotopic analyses of what is the only Pleistocene faunal assemblage documented in western Africa.

Native American fire management at an ancient wildland-urban interface in the Southwest United States.

The intersection of expanding human development and wildland landscapes-the "wildland-urban interface" or WUI-is one of the most vexing contexts for fire management because it involves complex interacting systems of people and nature. Here, we document the dynamism and stability of an ancient WUI that was apparently sustainable for more than 500 y. We combine ethnography, archaeology, paleoecology, and ecological modeling to infer intensive wood and fire use by Native American ancestors of Jemez Pueblo and the consequences on fire size, fire-climate relationships, and fire intensity.

On Intensive Late Holocene Iron Mining and Production in the Northern Congo Basin and the Environmental Consequences Associated with Metallurgy in Central Africa.

An ongoing question in paleoenvironmental reconstructions of the central African rainforest concerns the role that prehistoric metallurgy played in shaping forest vegetation. Here we report evidence of intensive iron-ore mining and smelting in forested regions of the northern Congo Basin dating to the late Holocene. Volumetric estimates on extracted iron-ore and associated slag mounds from prehistoric sites in the southern Central African Republic suggest large-scale iron production on par with other archaeological and historically-known iron fabrication areas.